Reporter's Notebook

Prompted by Emma Green’s note on the Supreme Court case Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, for which a group of lawyers filed a document openly describing their abortions, readers share their own stories in an ongoing series edited by Chris Bodenner. We are posting a wide range of perspectives—from pro-choice and pro-life readers, women and men alike—so if you have an experience not represented thus far, please send us a note: hello@theatlantic.com.

A reader remembers how she came upon one of the worst abortion clinic attacks in U.S. history:

December 30, 1994. It started before I even got out of the cab. The protesters were screaming, flashing their gruesome signs, even in liberal Brookline, Mass. The cab driver felt it was his place to ask, rudely, “This is an abortion clinic?” as I fished bills out of my wallet. “It’s a women’s health clinic,” I snapped, slamming the door on the way out.

There was one protester who blocked my path, a tall, heavyset woman, screaming in booming voice, “Don’t kill your baby,” as she stood between me and the door. In that moment, she seemed like a giant to me, like something out of a nightmare. I later learned she was well-known to both Planned Parenthood and the authorities. I read somewhere that she was such a threat that she was cited specifically during the court proceedings that established the buffer zones around Massachusetts clinics. The buffer zones we no longer have, thanks to a fanatical local grandmother and our current Supreme Court.

I got inside, past the security guard in the vestibule, and through to the reception window in the waiting room.

I wish I could remember every single word the receptionist said to me, but I don’t. What I do remember very clearly is that she made me feel comforted. She helped me calm down after the harassment I’d just endured, and I was grateful. I remember thinking, this woman is perfect for this job. It was a weird thing to think, but I did. Something about her demeanor, like she was sorry for what you were going through, but rooting for you, like a sympathetic sister. No judgment, no pity, just kindness. I’ll never forget it.

The waiting room was small and crowded, and my seat faced the door. I went alone that day, but other patients had brought boyfriends, husbands, friends. Friends had offered to accompany me, but I’d turned them all down. One woman in the waiting room was upset; she seemed to be struggling with her decision. I’m pretty sure she changed her mind. Contrary to anti-choice propaganda, Planned Parenthood does not push their services on anyone.

They called me to the back after a short wait. I had to have an ultrasound, because I was a participant in the clinical trials for RU486. The doctor inserted the probe, and I debated whether I should look at the screen. He told me I didn't have to look if I didn’t want to, which I appreciated.

Whether I looked or not, I don’t remember, because my ultrasound was interrupted by screaming. It was muffled, but I heard thumps, banging. Chaos. The doctor left the room, and then a nurse came in and told me, with tears in her eyes, that a gunman had shot up the waiting room I’d just left. The lovely receptionist, Shannon Lowney, was dead. John Salvi, domestic terrorist, murdered her, then drove up Beacon Street a couple of miles and murdered Lee Ann Nichols, a receptionist at another clinic.

It was terrifying, and sad, and every other awful thing you can imagine. The time passed in a blur, and all I really remember is that the staff, all of them, were incredible. I’ve never see anything like it. They carried on, wiping tears, and did their jobs. I was amazed that they didn’t immediately shut down and clear the place out, but they didn’t. I can still see the nurse, wiping her eyes as she handed me the cup with the pills. We had to stay for hours as the police did their work, and as the day wore on, it sunk in that these workers, who were so professional in such horrible circumstances, had been prepared for this—expecting it even, on some level. And they did their jobs anyway. I still think about that a lot, 20 years later.

Other readers have shared their reasons for seeking abortion services, but my story isn’t about agonizing decisions. My reason was simple: I wasn’t ready. I have twin daughters now, and they are the children I was meant to have. I don’t regret my decision, although I did feel guilty for a long time, in large part because of the culture of judgment and shaming that surrounds this issue. I don’t dwell on the clump of tissue that I saw in my toilet a day after the shooting. But I think about Shannon Lowney a lot.

What I still wrestle with today is not the fact that I had an abortion. It’s the fact that strangers—women among them—will go to such lengths to intimidate patients and providers exercising their constitutional rights. My experience turned me strident; I make very few distinctions between “peaceful" protestors and the John Salvis of this world. I could never be friends, real friends, with an anti-choice person. The issue is too fraught for me.

I tell few people about my experience, and I’m ashamed of my cowardice. The women who share their stories with the world are doing god’s work, and I applaud them. I wonder what it would be like, to feel like I could talk about it freely, to help normalize it, put a face to it. But I’m afraid, too. I’m too proud—too closed off, maybe.

And then I get angry all over again, because I think, why should I have to tell? Does my husband have to tell his boss about his prostate exam? Is it fair that women's private healthcare decisions have become political theater, even on the micro level of day-to-day life? I’d like my daughters to grow up in a society where they would no more think of telling random acquaintances about an abortion than they would a pap smear. But the anti-choice crowd, from the voter to the gunman, will never allow it to be so.

Here’s the thing: I’m happy to tell my abortion story, but it’s not the kind that will sway anyone who thinks women shouldn’t have control over their own bodies toward thinking maybe they should. There’s no hardship, no sad backstory. I didn’t do this to be a better mom to my other kids or because I couldn’t afford to have a child or because I was single and didn’t know how I would raise a kid alone. (The only thing resembling hardship was the unbelievable pain I was in for several weeks, like the kind of pain where you have to excuse yourself from conversation to go curl up into a ball and writhe, which I did more times than I can count.)

I just didn’t want kids. Still. Ever. Never had. And to paraphrase Katha Pollitt, puberty to menopause is a long damn time to make sure no stray sperm ever gets in your uterus.

The decision was probably the easiest I ever made, and that’s not an exaggeration. I called Planned Parenthood, made an appointment, walked in four days later, and walked out no longer pregnant. Once upon a time, I thought we would get to a point where I wouldn’t have to consider myself lucky or privileged to live in a state where I could do that. I went to Planned Parenthood because I was new to the city and I didn’t have an OB/GYN, and I knew they would take excellent care of me. Which they did.

That night was the first night in weeks I slept straight through without waking up every hour or two in excruciating pain. The next morning, I wanted to dance a jig I was so happy.

This pro-life reader, on the other hand, couldn’t have a more different view:

Intentionally or not, your request seems to be limited to the perspective of only half of the people affected by abortion. On the chance that you are interested in all of our personal stories, here’s mine:

I was born and adopted in February 1968. My birth mother was an unmarried 16-year-old Catholic girl in Syracuse, NY. I was adopted by a married couple who had been told they couldn’t have children of their own for medical reasons.

I have had a great life, and I am grateful to my adopted parents and my birth mother for it. I am fairly confident that if abortion were legal and accepted at the time of my birth, I would have been killed before birth.

I am never going to identify with either the mother or the father of an unwanted child; I will always identify with that child. Legalized abortion is normalizing the murder of an innocent human life.

Another pro-life reader:

I had two children out of wedlock. I’ve never really considered abortion a choice. No, I’m not a religious fanatic.

Background is important. In brief, I am the product of Navy date rape, born in 1966. My mother was an OB and labor and delivery nurse. She was once fired for refusing to do second-term abortions, leaving her a single mom unemployed. We are Irish Protestant, but marched in the 1970s with Catholics against abortion.

I had a hellish childhood and stereotypically made bad men choices. After a divorce and while in the service, I fell in love with a bad boy and got pregnant at 24. Birth control of all sorts never worked. I had an old white man randomly tell me I should get an abortion because the child would be biracial and have a hard life. This was 1991.

I went through college and bought a home but struggled in raising my son. I got pregnant by a horrible person. This time I wished to some degree I believed in abortion because I was just getting my footing with my six year old and finances. I had my tubes tied after my daughter was born.

My kids are now 17 and 24. It has been hard. I worked hard. Things haven’t turned out as I hoped. But my kids wanted for nothing (material). I am a GS-13 and make attorney wages.

Life and morals aside, I view abortion as quitting on your kid. I hold my head up as a fighter. I don’t respect the view of someone who is an attorney because she had an abortion; she took the lazy way. With age and disappointment, I understand the why of people having abortions. It is hard to be strong. No one respects those who keep their kids and do their best. And for those like me with no responsible fathers and family, it is exhausting.

Another reader emails her story of undergoing a late-term abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with a severe brain abnormality. She offers a challenge: Why is there any cognitive or moral dissonance in thinking about her fetus as her child, but still choosing to abort?

More on that in a minute. First, her story in her own words:

In December of 2014, I was six and a half months pregnant with my first baby when she was diagnosed with a rare brain abnormality called lissencephaly. Lissencephaly means “smooth brain,” which refers to the condition’s characteristic lack of folding in the cortex. There are a range of possible outcomes, but they’re all pretty grim.

Children with lissencephaly have painful seizures that are often very difficult to control with medication. Most have problems breathing and swallowing that result in frequent respiratory infections and choking episodes, even involving their own saliva. They often require a feeding tube to survive.

Many have no cognitive development beyond three-to-five month milestones and cannot even track motion with their eyes or smile socially. They typically have little to no control of their bodies and cannot lift their heads or roll over, let alone sit or crawl.

In some less severe cases, children with lissencephaly have the ability to learn a few simple hand signs and, in very rare cases, learn to walk. However, even in those abnormally mild cases, the children still suffer from seizures, respiratory infections, and choking fits. The maximum life expectancy is six to ten years, so most of them die much younger than that.

The folding of the cortex largely happens during the second trimester, so lissencephaly is almost never diagnosed before 25 weeks of pregnancy and often isn’t diagnosed until after birth. My baby's condition was only detected because the ventricles in her brain were measuring on the upper end of the normal range at my second trimester anatomy scan (at 18 weeks) and the examining doctor decided to have me come back to check on the brain development.

The follow-up at 22 weeks detected further abnormalities, but at that point we were told there was still a 70 percent chance our baby would have normal cognitive development or only minor developmental delays.

They were not able to diagnose her lissencephaly until 28 weeks. Given the relatively early presentation of the folding issues in her case, our doctors predicted that she would be on the more severe end of the spectrum. But even the best prognosis for children with lissencephaly is bad enough that if I were facing the same prognosis, I would not want my own life prolonged. My own medical advance directive stipulates that I do not want a feeding tube or artificial respiration if I would be in severe pain or not be able to recover basic life functions, such as being able to communicate and perceive much of the world around me. I thought it would be immoral to bring my baby into the world knowing how much she was likely to suffer.

I was past the legal limit on abortion in my home state of Michigan, so my husband and I made the decision to travel to one of the four clinics in the country that perform later abortions for fetal medical indication. We paid $12,500 out-of-pocket for the procedure. Dr. Hern at the Boulder Abortion Clinic stopped my baby’s heart with an injection of digoxin on December 16, 2014 and began a three-day process of dilating my cervix with expanding seaweed sticks called laminaria. I delivered her intact and still on December 19.

As the reader mentions, Hern is one of the four openly advertising late-term abortion providers in the United States. Boulder Abortion Clinic is in Colorado; the other three doctors work at clinics in Bellevue, Nebraska, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. The four doctors were featured in After Tiller, a documentary inspired by the murder of late-term abortion provider George Tiller in May 2009:

A few things strike me about the way this reader describes her and her husband’s decision-making process. She focuses on the level of suffering that the child would have experienced if she had been born, suggesting that prevention of pain is her highest moral priority. She employs empathy—“if I were facing the same prognosis, I would not want my own life prolonged”—in trying to figure out what’s best for her unborn child. And most strikingly, she doesn’t shy away from using “person” words—“she,” “her,” “baby.” There’s a reason for this, she writes:

I refer to her as a baby and as my child because the pregnancy was planned and wanted, I loved her very much (and still do), and at the point where we got her diagnosis and chose to end her life, she was likely “viable” in the sense that if I had gone into labor spontaneously, she would have had a chance of surviving, at least for the limited duration a child with her condition can survive.

She may not have been able to do what most people probably mean when they use the word “think,” but I don’t think that means she did not have a moral identity. Indeed, one of the primary reasons I chose to have an abortion was because I did not want her to suffer the way she almost certainly would have if she had been born alive. Is there any reason to care about the suffering of an entity that has no moral identity?

The decision to have an abortion was also based on considerations about my health, lifestyle, and career. Having a late-term abortion was the best way to protect my health and especially my chances of being able to get pregnant again. Although there are some risks associated with a late-term abortion, they are much smaller than the risks associated with a full-term birth, particularly when there is a chance the baby’s head will swell with fluid, which is always a risk in the case of brain abnormalities.

My husband and I also considered what our lives would be like if we had to manage the care and supervision of a severely disabled child. We likely would not have chosen to welcome another child into our lives in that situation, and I would have had to leave my job permanently.

The entity I aborted was a human child—my child, my much-loved, much-wanted, first baby. But my choice to have an abortion and my ability to do so was also a health, lifestyle, and career issue. I don’t see why those things ought to be seen as mutually exclusive or the source of any “cognitive dissonance,” as you put it.

To me, the most interesting parts of this story are the alternate-scenario questions: What if … ? If you believe that a fetus has a moral identity—which not all women, and certainly not all philosophers, do—what are the boundary lines of a mother’s (and, to add more complication, father’s) moral right to make decisions about the life of her child?

For example: How much anticipated future pain and suffering for the child is enough to justify eliminating that life? How much anticipated risk to the mother’s health is enough, or projected suffering in carrying the child to term?

If disability-based suffering isn’t the main factor in making the decision—such as in the amicus brief filed by female lawyers who said having an abortion was a crucial factor in their career success—is there more dissonance in deciding to end the future life of a human with a “moral identity”?

Finally: What are the shades of moral difference between terminating a fetus that could not survive outside the womb vs. one that can, even if, as in this case, it would suffer from significant disabilities? What’s the difference between those decisions and the decision to kill such a child after it has been born, or let it die? That last question, about infanticide, is particularly charged, not least because of the common-sense “disgust” factor. As Jeff McMahan, a former Rutgers professor who’s now at Oxford, wrote in 2007:

Although philosophers have conducted a wide-ranging debate about the morality of abortion for more than thirty years, generating in the process an extensive literature on the topic, they have, with very few exceptions, shrunk from extending the debate to include a discussion of infanticide. I know from discussions with prominent writers on ethics that some have been deterred from writing on the subject by fear of possible consequences for their reputations, careers and even physical security ... My own experience is much more limited, but tends to confirm that discussing infanticide is not the best way to win friends or secure admiring book reviews.

More on that here. In the meantime, send thoughts to hello@theatlantic.com, along with more of your stories—particularly ones that show some of the moral ambiguity in these choices.

I am now 28, but I was 25 when I got pregnant for the first time. My husband and I had been married three years and decided together that this was the time, since we were financially stable enough to afford a child. Not that our background matters, but we are everyday people. We are your neighbor or the happy couple in the grocery store. My husband was in the Air Force and I had just quit my job selling high-end furniture. He has his Master’s degree and I have an AA in interior design. We are intelligent, thoughtful people who care about others and our country. Unfortunately, I felt failed by my country in 2012.

We were stationed in Oklahoma when we found out we were having a baby. I’ll never forget how my husband literally clapped with happiness when I told him I was pregnant. We both were so happy! At 18 weeks 5 days, we were “going to find out the sex” of the baby (it’s actually a scan to search for fetal anomalies).

Immediately after telling us we were having a girl, the ultrasound tech stopped speaking to us. She would respond with yes or no and was taking so many pictures. She quite literally ran out of the room after handing us our pictures. I told my husband that something doesn’t feel right, but he assured me it was fine.

The tech walked back in and said the doctor was on the phone for me. I picked up the phone and the doctor said a term I had heard before—spina bifida—and others I hadn’t—“ventricles” and “hydrocephalus.”

We had an emergency appointment the next morning with a perinatologist where the doctor brought us to a tiny room after scanning me himself and confirming everything. My little girl was sick. She had the worst form of spina bifida—hydrocephalus—and her cerebellum was “smashed like a pancake,” as he so elegantly put it, while just generally having some open spaces in her brain.

He told us everything that she would certainly suffer: paralyzation, pain, headaches, incontinence, surgeries upon surgeries upon surgeries, and mental retardation. Other symptoms that were likely were blindness and deafness and being in a vegetative state.

WHAT?! But I had done everything right! I’ve never smoked or done any drugs, I don’t drink, I took all of my prenatals, I’m healthy and I’m young! This wasn’t supposed to happen!!

Between my sobs, he gave us our options: keep the baby as is with no intervention, go to the East Coast where they perform surgeries in-utero to close the opening on the spine—but that’s all; the damage is done … or “some people choose to abort these babies.”

I was appalled at his suggestion and said I couldn’t kill my baby and left.

After about 30 minutes of my husband and I crying together and holding each other in our bed, we both decided that abortion was the most humane option for our daughter. We loved her, I felt her move, but she was going to suffer greatly. She would not know the pain that life had waiting for her; I would take it all. She would only know the warmth of my womb, the sound of my heartbeat, and the freedom of movement she would never experience after birth.

This is where we were failed. When my husband called the perinatologist to tell him of our decision, we were given the number for Whole Women’s Health in San Antonio EIGHT HOURS AWAY. At 19 week, I did not have a right to have an abortion in Oklahoma. I was sent away. My Air Force husband fought for the rights of others, but not us apparently. If he had not been stationed in Oklahoma, we could’ve been home in California, where I wouldn’t have been sent away like some dirty, shameful mother.

I was forced to have an ultrasound by some politician and in that ultrasound the doctor revealed that in just a week my daughter’s bones in her legs were becoming deformed. I knew what I was doing was even more right, but a forced ultrasound is cruel to those who weren’t in my exact situation. I do not support them at all.

I was never so desperate for a miracle as I was that day. I’ve never wanted to wake up from a nightmare so badly. As I was strapped to the operating table, I asked to please let me see her one more time, so the nurse turned the ultrasound screen toward me and I cried my eyes out as I said goodbye. The nurse teared up and rubbed my arm and tried to comfort me. I’ll never forget that gesture of kindness on her part.

And then, with a hard poke of my belly, my daughter was gone. She no longer moved. I had to carry my baby girl’s lifeless body in my belly for 24 hours before labor was induced. I’ve never wished to die before, but I just wanted to end my pain and to be with my daughter somewhere where she wasn’t in pain. I’ve never apologized to someone I had never met so much. I think I apologized to her a million times, but I’ve never regretted my decision.

Do you know what it’s like to see the love of your life in fetal position bawling so hard that he sounds nothing like himself because he just lost his daughter and watched his wife die on the inside? To ever think that this kind of decision is taken lightly is ignorance at its worst.

I am thankful everyday that my daughter wasn’t born. I made my first and only decision as her mother not to allow her to suffer and I am the only person who should ever have that right.

After she was gone, I learned from my perinatologist that he never thought she was going to survive her birth, but he was afraid to suggest abortion because we lived in Oklahoma. I’m sure that if word got out that a Oklahoma doctor was suggesting abortion, then the nation’s most hateful people would go insane. I felt so betrayed by him, but mostly by where we were forced to live because of the military. His hands were tied and he couldn’t tell me his professional opinion and let me believe she COULD’VE lived. She would’ve had a miserable existence, but she was going to be alive, according to him. To let me make the decision to abort without telling me she was most likely going to die anyway is cruel.

I was pregnant for the second time six weeks later out of desperation. I was watched closely and put on folic acid, and now my son is two and a half and amazing. I suffered depression from my loss and severe post-partum depression after the birth of my son, but I knew that I was sacrificing my mind and body for my children. That was the decision I made.

Whenever I hear anti-abortion rhetoric that centers upon the idea that abortion is selfish and denies a potential human life, as one of your readers believes, I think about my aunt and her daughter. My cousin became pregnant when she was in high school. She became pregnant again, twice out of wedlock. I don’t know what, or if, she currently works, but she didn’t graduate high school and her prospects have never been good; she mostly leeches off her mother.

My cousin’s oldest son impregnated a girl while he was in high school, and dropped out of college—despite having an athletic scholarship—after suffering some kind of breakdown. The other two children have struggled with mental illness as well. Last I had heard the oldest son didn’t have a job and blames my aunt for his breakdown, despite the fact she effectively raised all three of her daughter’s children while struggling to remain employed in low-paying jobs and never did anything but support his interests and efforts. She has expressed to my mother that she wishes she had just had an abortion, because her life, despite all her effort, has been a string of tragedies.

As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, babies are not guaranteed to grow up to be good people. They are not guaranteed to make life better for others, or to be happy, or to do anything positive whatsoever. Many people, despite receiving love and care from their parents, will make society worse.

My aunt’s case is anecdotal, yes, but it is impossible for me to view it as anything other than evidence that an abortion is often the least costly option in terms of impact to society and simple human life. How much poverty, how much crime, how much misery would be eliminated if some people had simply never existed? To raise a child is a gamble, and if a woman does not, for whatever reason, wish to upend her life on that chance, it can only be to our benefit as a culture.

I can’t help but think of the famous hypothesis in Freakonomics about how Roe v. Wade contributed to a steep reduction of crime a generation later:

John Donohue and Steven Levitt point to the fact that males aged 18 to 24 are most likely to commit crimes. Data indicates that crime in the United States started to decline in 1992. Donohue and Levitt suggest that the absence of unwanted children, following legalization in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children.

The authors argue that states that had abortion legalized earlier should have the earliest reductions in crime. Donohue and Levitt's study indicates that this indeed has happened: Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon and Washington experienced steeper drops in crime, and had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade. Further, states with a high abortion rate have experienced a greater reduction in crime, when corrected for factors like average income. Finally, studies in Canada and Australia claim to have established a correlation between legalized abortion and overall crime reduction.

I think people frame this issue all wrong. A reader wrote, “Surely ‘but getting an abortion allowed me to continue living as I pleased’ must rank somewhat low on the scale of moral arguments.” Prior to viability outside the womb (a moving target to be sure), women shouldn’t NEED a moral argument to have an abortion. They are not required by law or morality to ever bear children. It is society that needs a moral argument for denying women bodily autonomy and forcing them to bear children they don’t want and/or can’t have for whatever reason.

When you frame it like that, I think it becomes pretty clear that the current compromise we have with Roe v. Wade makes sense. In what situation is it moral to make a woman give birth against her will?

People will argue that if women don’t want to be pregnant, they should either abstain from sex or use birth control. I can tell you that both of these “methods” fail pretty regularly despite everyone’s best intentions. In those scenarios, do people find it “moral” to have an abortion? Is it suddenly ok if you can prove you were actively avoiding pregnancy? And if you WEREN’T actively avoiding pregnancy, does it make sense to treat pregnancy like a punishment?

Everyone has the right to determine if, when and how they become parents, and the moral arguments in support of that are numerous. Isn’t “wanting to have an established career in order to give my future child the best possible life” a moral argument? Isn’t “not wanting my future child to have an abusive parent” a moral argument?

I’m so tired of this debate. Oh, and to state my bona fides (as we all apparently must do to have any authority to speak on these topics): I have had an abortion, I have a beautiful baby boy, and I’m adopted, so I think I have my bases covered.

She is amazingly resilient and should be commended for sharing with us; we need to hear tales like hers. Thank you for this project.

Another reader, on the other hand, fiercely dissents:

These stories are among the sickest, cruelest examples of people rationalizing their abortions. The female lawyer wrote: “To the world, I am an attorney who had an abortion, and, to myself, I am an attorney because I had an abortion.” Career before life? If your career goals are high enough, then you should have an abortion? If not?

Another woman wrote that she had an abortion because she didn’t want to risk her child growing up knowing their father. The way this article talks—“look what it did for us”—everyone should have an abortion. Is this really the face abortionists want to put on abortion? Self-serving rationalization?

In reducing abortion to (selected) anecdotes, Americans rely on the unwillingness of nice Americans to make serious challenges to the moral argumentation of individuals. It would be churlish, for example, to suggest sexual prudence to the end of obtaining one’s paramount goals of education and career. Surely “but getting an abortion allowed me to continue living as I pleased” must rank somewhat low on the scale of moral arguments.

It ought to be possible to set up abortion laws that deal with the most widely repugnant cases while leaving abortion mostly available—the sort of laws that prevail in most of those more enlightened Western European countries. The problem, it seems to me, is that we keep coming down to cases that are either easy to deal with as exceptional (the rape cases) or which are easy to criticize as (a) defending irresponsibility and (b) too dismissive of the weight of fetal life. Both of these enable an absolutist right-to-life response: the first because it trivializes its own cause, and the second because it surely must be the case that an argument against such a right-to-life needs real moral substance.

I should add that my wife and I were put up to the abortion decision. The AFP test for our third child came up low, showing a risk for Down’s. The test is not conclusive, and we would have had to do amniocentesis to confirm, which we declined, since the procedure has a significant miscarriage risk. (Abortions of Down’s pregnancies range from 60 percent up to 90 percent, depending on the study.)

Our son was born and, after some months of substandard growth, was diagnosed with Down’s. While we are fortunate he has no substantial health issues, our lives have to be planned around the requirement that someone be with him and that there are many places we cannot take him. But we simply could not contemplate destroying him because he was going to be deeply imperfect or because his birth would make our lives difficult.

I was 26 when my oldest son was born. When he was nine months old, we learned I had passed an unbalanced chromosome translocation to him. The result was a severe developmental disability. It’s complicated, but it meant my husband and I had a 75 percent chance of having a disabled child with each pregnancy. I longed to grow our family and to give our son siblings. We explored all our options, from adoption to pre-genetic testing, out of pocket costs ranging from $10,000 to $100,000.

When our son was two and a half, we discovered I was pregnant again. We naively hoped all would be fine. An early ultrasound showed I was carrying twins. A genetic test could be performed as early as 11 weeks to know if I had passed the genetic anomaly, but my OB thought it was too risky. She refused to do it and said we had to wait for an amniocentesis at 16 weeks. The results took two weeks and we learned I had passed the anomaly to each fetus in my 28th week.

We decided to terminate the pregnancy. We lived in Phoenix, and my OB gave me two choices: Planned Parenthood, with all the protestors, or a private clinic, discrete and private. I chose the later only to learn after the fact it was a black market provider.

The date was April 19, 2003. We paid $1,000. Only cash was accepted. I was 19 weeks pregnant, there was no anesthesiologist on staff. I woke up half-way through the procedure, received an array of medications that resulted in severe cramping of my uterus, and was diagnosed with genital herpes a month later. The doctor and his staff treated my husband terribly, as if this were his fault. It was a horrifying and very scary experience.

My OB’s nurse told me later that my doctor referred me there because she didn’t agree with my decision. My husband and I decided I would never get pregnant again and I never saw my OB again.

When we met with our pastor to seek his counsel and support, he wrapped his arms around me and my husband and told us we did the right thing. He felt our marriage wouldn’t have survived three disabled children.

Five years later, we were living in Minnesota and were at at the Mayo Clinic with our son. He had an appointment with a geneticist, who asked if we planned to try to have more kids. We said we longed to but felt we could not afford it. We shared our abortion story, which stunned the doctor. He encouraged us to try again, stressing that the support of the medical community in Minnesota would be quite different. He reminded us we had a 25 percent chance of success.

My husband and I discussed trying again for many months. I consulted with my new OB, who held my hand and said he would do everything in his power to help us if we chose to try. And so we did.

When our son was eight, I became pregnant. We had a genetic test at 11 weeks. The ultrasound did not look good—the back of the neck measured thick, a tell-tale sign things were bad. Results came the following week: I had passed the anomaly again.

I had an abortion at 13 weeks. This time, it was done as an outpatient procedure in a hospital. My husband and I were surrounded by supportive medical professionals who grieved our loss with us. A med student was present, being trained to provide abortions as part of his future practice. The abortion was covered by our medical insurance.

Abortions in Minnesota require a 24-hour waiting period. Once we informed our doctor of our decision to have an abortion, by law we were required to sign off on a document that had a long check list of questions, such as:

Did I know my baby had a beating heart?

If I made this decision for financial reasons, did I know there were welfare programs available to me and the baby?

Was I aware that the biological father would be required to provide child support?

My doctor and I signed off on the document and then I had to wait 24 hours, to think about a little more—as if the seven years of thinking that had preceded that moment weren’t enough. I had the abortion the following day, October 3, 2008.

We tried again. When our son was nine, I became pregnant. Again, genetic test at 11 weeks. The ultrasound looked good; no thickness measured in the neck. We received the results the following week. They were normal. I had not passed the anomaly. Success!

A routine ultrasound at 19 weeks uncovered a different story. My placenta and umbilical chord had not formed correctly. As a result, only half the heart had formed, the fetus’s kidneys had already failed, and its stomach and head measured less than half the size they should have. We were devastated, and chose to have a third abortion. It was July 1, a Wednesday, my 35th birthday.

Again, the same doctor, the same hospital, the same extraordinarily supportive medical team, a new med student this time, and the same 24-hour waiting period. This time, because I was in my second trimester, it required a two-day procedure. The 24-hour waiting period coincided with the Independence Day weekend. Instead of talking through the same ridiculous document of questions, signing off and beginning the procedure the next day, Thursday, I was forced to wait an additional 96 hours because my doctor was on vacation on Friday for the holiday. Minnesota’s 24-hour law made an very painful time in my life excruciating.

The following Monday—July 7, 2009—I had my third abortion. We decided it would be my last.

Despite using condoms and birth control pills, I learned I was pregnant again the following October. Unbelievable. What was God doing to me?

I didn’t tell my husband I was pregnant for four weeks—not because I wished to keep it a secret, but because I could not physically talk about it or utter the words, “I’m pregnant.” I was horrified.

At eleven weeks, another genetic test. The ultrasound looks fine, we were told. The results a week later were normal. No anomaly had been passed. I was numb, scared, and didn’t believe it would end positively. I hid the pregnancy until my 30th week and then told my co-workers I would not talk about it. I braced for the worst. With each ultrasound I asked the tech to turn off the monitor. I didn’t want to watch. I always received a look of disbelief but demanded I would not watch. It took everything I had to not bond with the baby inside. I couldn’t go through that pain again.

And then, on June 6, 2000, on our 12th wedding anniversary, our second son was born, healthy and as typical as could be. Same hospital, same extraordinarily supportive medical team, and the result I had prayed for across the previous nine years.

I never talk about my abortions. Only three people know.

It is not because I feel shame. I know I made all the right decisions. I respect that not all women would have done what I chose to do. The pain in reliving these times in my life is simply too much, and that pain is private.

And yet, I have struggled with a sense of responsibility to share my story. Not every woman who gets an abortion is 19 and facing the consequences of a lapse in judgement. We are not poor, irresponsible or murderers. I am a loving wife and mother. I would do anything for my children, even decide that they should not live outside of my womb and face a life of struggle, pain, and discrimination, or decide that if they could have a healthy sibling to help them in their life that I would do everything in my power to do just that. This is my story.

I read your story about the group of Texas attorneys and their own abortions and would like to share my own story. I am a medical student at one of the nation’s top med schools who graduated from college with dual microbiology/chemistry degrees and a 4.0. I became pregnant during my senior year and did not hesitate to have an abortion. I knew this decision was right for me and my future children. I am going to be a surgeon because I had an abortion.

Women who have abortions aren’t the deadbeat, promiscuous, Godless stereotypes that society paints them. Although theoretically I was much more prepared for a baby than many women are fortunate to be (at age 22 and with a bachelors degree under my belt and a supportive family behind me), I would not be able to give that child the best life. I exercised my constitutional right to have an abortion, and I haven’t had a single regret.

Another reader chooses to use her real name, Sarah Berry:

I’m a college teacher who became pregnant while in graduate school. I got pregnant while using a diaphragm (properly)—these things happen. Having an abortion was hard because I knew I wanted children, but I wasn’t in a stable relationship or career. I’m now the happy mother of two thriving children. Access to abortion is essential for women to have an equal shot at self-actualization in the world and for children to have happy, thriving moms.

Another reader:

I was 20 and a sophomore in college. I had been dating my high school boyfriend for almost three years when I met someone else in class that August (2012). I realized I was attracted to him as we became closer friends, and I ended up sleeping with him that Christmas break.

Shortly afterward, confused, I told my boyfriend I wanted to go on a break without telling him what had happened. While we were on the break, I continued to see the new guy on and off, and that February I found out I was pregnant and knew it was his.

I knew immediately I wanted to get an abortion. I’ve always been pro-choice, and I didn’t have a doubt that it was the right decision for me. As a college student, I didn’t have the resources to support a child, and while my family would have been supportive, I just knew I didn’t want to be a mother yet. I wanted to graduate and focus on my future, not to mention the complications of my relationship status. I didn’t know if I wanted to continue seeing the new guy or eventually get back together with my boyfriend, and either way, having a baby would complicate it.

I took the pregnancy test and told my best friend and the guy I was seeing, and then immediately I called my local women’s clinic to schedule an appointment. This was on a Monday, and the soonest availability they had was Friday. It was the longest week of my life, and was probably the hardest part of the entire process. When Friday came along, I took off work and class and went with my friends for the procedure.

From that point on, it was so easy I was almost worried about myself. Our culture tells women this is an agonizing, life-changing decision, and I thought something was wrong with me for being so confident and calm about what I was doing. I was only six weeks along, so I was able to have a medical abortion rather than a surgical one, and thankfully I have insurance that covered the procedure except for a $30 co-pay that was later refunded.

I told my boyfriend about everything, and he called me a whore and a murderer and sent me photos of fetuses, and we broke up for good.

I haven’t regretted my decision once. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I had decided to keep the child. I graduated summa cum laude in May and then spent three months in Europe working as an au pair and sightseeing, and I’ve continued to happily date the guy I met that August.

I live in a state that has followed the national trend of restricting women’s access to abortion services, and I think every day about how lucky I am that the process was easy for me. I had a support network, I had insurance, I could afford to miss a day of work, the clinic was less than two miles away. Each of these privileges means my pregnancy was a short episode in my life, rather than the defining factor of it. I hope one day soon that will be true for all women.

Thank you for reporting on this important issue, and thanks for reading my story.

To share yours, email hello@theatlantic.com. (Please indicate whether you’d like to use your real name or remain anonymous.) One more reader for now:

Up in my closet, among the t-shirts collected from various marathons, fund-raisers, and intolerable NPR drives, is a never worn t-shirt from the Emma Goldman clinic. I bought it my senior year of college because my freshman year of college I went there to get an abortion.

Unlike the other t-shirts, which are threadbare, this one has never had its public debut. I have never gotten rid of it, moving it from college to home to first apartment to second apartment to all the place between then and now, and yet, I have never worn it.

That is a great shame, I think.

The Emma Goldman clinic saved me from a boyfriend who sent me down a flight of stairs at a party and kicked me with his feet in public settings. It allowed me an education, a career, and a marriage. Yet, I do not celebrate it and I do not promote it.

I think maybe that is the greatest setback of this fight for reproductive freedom. It’s women like me who don’t stand up to say, “Yes, it was sad. Yes, I was scared, Yes, I still think about it, but given the chance, I would make the same decision.”

So maybe in addition to the “I stand with Planned Parenthood” magnet and the pro-choice posts on Facebook, I will do something really radical: I will wear my Emma Goldman t-shirt and show the world that I am not ashamed, but that I am grateful.

This year, for the first time in nearly a decade, the Supreme Court will hear a case on abortion. Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt*takes up restrictions on clinics and physicians who provide abortions in Texas, which were passed in 2013. The Court will decide whether these restrictions place an “undue burden” on women in the state.

Earlier this week, a wave of new briefs were filed in support of either side of the case. Among them was a brief representing “113 women in the legal profession who have exercised their constitutional right to an abortion.”

This document is remarkable for a number of reasons. It represents the perspectives of people who are trained in the law, but who are also personally familiar with what it means to get an abortion. It rejects the idea that women should feel shame about having an abortion; these stories are serious, straightforward, and unapologetic. And it shortens the sense of distance between those who will decide the legal merits of the case and those whose lives will be affected—this brief isn’t well-educated experts advocating on behalf of women in need, it’s well-educated women advocating on behalf of themselves. As one of the women wrote, “To the world, I am an attorney who had an abortion, and, to myself, I am an attorney because I had an abortion.”

(So, if you’re willing to share: What is your personal story of abortion, either in choosing to have one or not, or perhaps anticipating that decision? We’ll keep stories anonymous by default, although if you’re willing to use your name, let us know: hello@theatlantic.com.)

But the document also highlights the complexity of abortion as an ethical and legal issue. Court cases necessarily consider questions of justice in the abstract, but deciding whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is one of the most intimate choices a woman can make. This fact has defined the political fight over abortion. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern smartly put it:

Unlike same-sex marriage, a constitutionally related right whose appeal derived largely from real-world stories, abortion is typically defended as an abstract, theoretical decision. That gives antiabortion advocates a distinct advantage: They can point to the small group of women who now regret their abortions while abortion rights groups struggle to put a compelling human face on the importance of abortion access.

To Stern’s point, this may be part of why public opinion on abortion has remained surprisingly steady since Roe vs. Wade—the messages and tactics of both pro- and anti-abortion groups don’t necessarily speak to the experiences of all women and families.

This difficult toggle—between abstract notions of justice and personal ethical questions—also might explain why the language used to talk about abortion often seems so awkward. For example: At least two of the women attorneys who shared their stories in this Supreme Court brief referred to the fetuses they terminated as “my child.”

One professor related that:

[T]he decisive factor in having an abortion was not subjecting my child to the dysfunction, and likely abuse, that it would endure in its father’s home…

One Amicus, a law professor, explained how obtaining an abortion allowed her to leave her abusive partner and complete her graduate studies:

My abortion provided me with the geographic freedom I needed, saved my child from having an abusive father, and allowed me to use my education for the social good.

There’s some degree of cognitive dissonance in these phrasings: “My child” is a way of talking about a person, an entity that can think and has a moral identity. But that’s the opposite of the argument that this brief is making—it’s not a moral issue, these women are saying. It’s a health issue, and a lifestyle issue, and a career issue. The vocabulary seems to fall short of that.

*Since this note was written, the case name was changed from Whole Women’s Health v. Cole.

The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.

Many of the tales of controversy to emerge from the Trump administration have been abstract, or complicated, or murky. Whenever anyone warns about destruction of “norms,” the conversation quickly becomes speculative—the harms are theoretical, vague, and in the future.

This makes new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

The story demonstrates the shortcomings of Trump’s attempt to bring private-sector techniques into government. It shows his tendency toward cronyism, his failures as a negotiator, and the ease with which a fairly primitive attention campaign can sway him. At heart, though, what it really exemplifies is Trump’s insistence on placing performative gestures over actual efficacy. And it is a concrete example—almost literally—of how the president’s violations of norms weaken the country and waste taxpayer money.

In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The mega-retailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance. They just want to have hangers when they need them.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

“Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy,” and 29 other lessons from seeing my Harvard class of 1988 all grown up

On the weekend before the opening gavel of what’s being dubbed the Harvard affirmative-action trial, a record-breaking 597 of my fellow members of the class of ’88 and I, along with alumni from other reunion classes, were seated in a large lecture hall, listening to the new president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, address the issue of diversity in the admissions process. What he said—and I’m paraphrasing, because I didn’t record it—was that he could fill five whole incoming classes with valedictorians who’d received a perfect score on the SAT, but that’s not what Harvard is or will ever be. Harvard tries—and succeeds, to my mind—to fill its limited spots with a diversity not only of race and class but also of geography, politics, interests, intellectual fields of study, and worldviews.

SpaceX and its competitors plan to envelop the planet with thousands of small objects in the next few years.

In 1957, a beach-ball-shaped satellite hurtled into the sky and pierced the invisible line between Earth and space. As it rounded the planet, Sputnik drew an unseen line of its own, splitting history into distinct parts—before humankind became a spacefaring species, and after. “Listen now for the sound that will forevermore separate the old from the new,” one NBC broadcaster said in awe, and insistent that others join him. He played the staccato call from the satellite, a gentle beep beep beep.

Decades later, we are not as impressed with satellites. There have been thousands of other Sputniks. Instead of earning front-page stories, satellites stitch together the hidden linings of our daily lives, providing and powering too many basic functions to list. They form a kind of exoskeleton around Earth, which is growing thicker every year with each new launch.

In its later seasons, the show started relying on heavy-handed historical references to do the difficult work of character-building.

When Game of Thrones ended its eight-year run on Sunday, the series finale, titled “The Iron Throne,” received a largely negative critical response. Many writers pointed out that the show’s last season had given up on the careful character-building of Thrones’ early days—a problem that, in truth, had started a few years back. The result was a seemingly rushed conclusion where multiple characters made poorly justified decisions and important story lines felt only halfway developed.

The show made plenty of mistakes in its final episode, but among the most significant was Thrones’ abrupt and uncharacteristic turn to moralizing—and its use of heavy-handed allusions to 20th-century history to do so. Characters who were once morally complicated, whose actions fit within well-developed personal motivations and fueled the show’s gripping political drama, became mechanisms to bring the story to a hasty, unearned conclusion. Characters like Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister—previously complex and fully formed—became, in “The Iron Throne,” mere tools in the service of a plodding message about the dangers of totalitarianism.

An ancient faith is disappearing from the lands in which it first took root. At stake is not just a religious community, but the fate of pluralism in the region.

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

The British prime minister, who said she will resign on June 7, had one job: to deliver Brexit. She failed to do it.

British Prime Minister Theresa May announced Friday that she “will shortly leave the job that has been the honor of my life to hold.”

The long-anticipated address, outside Downing Street, confirms that May will step down as the leader of the Conservative Party on June 7. She will remain prime minister until the party chooses a new leader, a process that will take approximately six weeks.

In many ways, May’s announcement marks a solemn end to a profoundly weak yet surprisingly stable premiership. But if the past three turbulent years of parliamentary deadlock, infighting, and division have demonstrated anything, it’s that May’s leadership ended a long time ago.

Her premiership didn’t begin that way. When May succeeded David Cameron as prime minister in July 2016, she inherited a parliamentary majority and a 20-point lead in the polls over the opposition Labour Party. She was dubbed the “New Iron Lady,” in a favorable nod to the country’s only other female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. But she also inherited a policy challenge of historic proportions: to deliver on a referendum result she didn’t support, and take Britain out of the European Union.

Uber was the most valuable private company in history, but the public market has not been as enthusiastic. The reason explains a lot about how the tech industry works.

Uber is now a massive, publicly traded company. Anyone can buy Uber shares at a valuation of about $70 billion. This isn’t bad for a company losing billions of dollars a year, but it’s a fraction of the $120-billion valuation the IPO’s bankers initially floated. It’s roughly what private investors valued it at three years ago, when the company made $7.43 billion less revenue.

If mothers and fathers speak openly about child-care obligations, their colleagues will adapt.

I’m an economist. I love data and evidence. I love them so much that I write books about data-based parenting. When questions arise about how to support parents at work (for example, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter), my first impulse is to endorse paid parental leave. Mountains of data and evidence show that paid leave is good for children’s health, and for mothers in particular. I am more than comfortable making a data-based case for this policy.

But experience, rather than pure data, leads me to believe that what happens after paid leave is nearly as crucial—that is to say, what happens when Mom and Dad return to the office. We need to normalize the experience of parenting while working.

Either Burger King was saying that it was going to send money to student borrowers using Cash App, a mobile payment service (a $cashtag is its version of a username), or the fast-food giant was trolling all 92,000 people who responded to the tweet. Some of the responses to the Whopper purveyor were in jest, others seemingly genuine, but everyone wanted to know: Is anyone actually getting any money?

On Thursday, Burger King provided an answer. An ad showed a white screen overlaid with a jarring statistic in slime green as “Pomp and Circumstance”— you know, the graduation song—plays; “65 percent of students enter the world with student debt,” it says. Then, in an abrupt transition, the Burger King “King” appears swinging a flamethrower like Michael B. Jordan in Fahrenheit 451. “Your student debt goes here,” a caption bubble reads.

The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.

Many of the tales of controversy to emerge from the Trump administration have been abstract, or complicated, or murky. Whenever anyone warns about destruction of “norms,” the conversation quickly becomes speculative—the harms are theoretical, vague, and in the future.

This makes new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

The story demonstrates the shortcomings of Trump’s attempt to bring private-sector techniques into government. It shows his tendency toward cronyism, his failures as a negotiator, and the ease with which a fairly primitive attention campaign can sway him. At heart, though, what it really exemplifies is Trump’s insistence on placing performative gestures over actual efficacy. And it is a concrete example—almost literally—of how the president’s violations of norms weaken the country and waste taxpayer money.

In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The mega-retailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance. They just want to have hangers when they need them.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

“Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy,” and 29 other lessons from seeing my Harvard class of 1988 all grown up

On the weekend before the opening gavel of what’s being dubbed the Harvard affirmative-action trial, a record-breaking 597 of my fellow members of the class of ’88 and I, along with alumni from other reunion classes, were seated in a large lecture hall, listening to the new president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, address the issue of diversity in the admissions process. What he said—and I’m paraphrasing, because I didn’t record it—was that he could fill five whole incoming classes with valedictorians who’d received a perfect score on the SAT, but that’s not what Harvard is or will ever be. Harvard tries—and succeeds, to my mind—to fill its limited spots with a diversity not only of race and class but also of geography, politics, interests, intellectual fields of study, and worldviews.

SpaceX and its competitors plan to envelop the planet with thousands of small objects in the next few years.

In 1957, a beach-ball-shaped satellite hurtled into the sky and pierced the invisible line between Earth and space. As it rounded the planet, Sputnik drew an unseen line of its own, splitting history into distinct parts—before humankind became a spacefaring species, and after. “Listen now for the sound that will forevermore separate the old from the new,” one NBC broadcaster said in awe, and insistent that others join him. He played the staccato call from the satellite, a gentle beep beep beep.

Decades later, we are not as impressed with satellites. There have been thousands of other Sputniks. Instead of earning front-page stories, satellites stitch together the hidden linings of our daily lives, providing and powering too many basic functions to list. They form a kind of exoskeleton around Earth, which is growing thicker every year with each new launch.

In its later seasons, the show started relying on heavy-handed historical references to do the difficult work of character-building.

When Game of Thrones ended its eight-year run on Sunday, the series finale, titled “The Iron Throne,” received a largely negative critical response. Many writers pointed out that the show’s last season had given up on the careful character-building of Thrones’ early days—a problem that, in truth, had started a few years back. The result was a seemingly rushed conclusion where multiple characters made poorly justified decisions and important story lines felt only halfway developed.

The show made plenty of mistakes in its final episode, but among the most significant was Thrones’ abrupt and uncharacteristic turn to moralizing—and its use of heavy-handed allusions to 20th-century history to do so. Characters who were once morally complicated, whose actions fit within well-developed personal motivations and fueled the show’s gripping political drama, became mechanisms to bring the story to a hasty, unearned conclusion. Characters like Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister—previously complex and fully formed—became, in “The Iron Throne,” mere tools in the service of a plodding message about the dangers of totalitarianism.

An ancient faith is disappearing from the lands in which it first took root. At stake is not just a religious community, but the fate of pluralism in the region.

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

The British prime minister, who said she will resign on June 7, had one job: to deliver Brexit. She failed to do it.

British Prime Minister Theresa May announced Friday that she “will shortly leave the job that has been the honor of my life to hold.”

The long-anticipated address, outside Downing Street, confirms that May will step down as the leader of the Conservative Party on June 7. She will remain prime minister until the party chooses a new leader, a process that will take approximately six weeks.

In many ways, May’s announcement marks a solemn end to a profoundly weak yet surprisingly stable premiership. But if the past three turbulent years of parliamentary deadlock, infighting, and division have demonstrated anything, it’s that May’s leadership ended a long time ago.

Her premiership didn’t begin that way. When May succeeded David Cameron as prime minister in July 2016, she inherited a parliamentary majority and a 20-point lead in the polls over the opposition Labour Party. She was dubbed the “New Iron Lady,” in a favorable nod to the country’s only other female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. But she also inherited a policy challenge of historic proportions: to deliver on a referendum result she didn’t support, and take Britain out of the European Union.

Uber was the most valuable private company in history, but the public market has not been as enthusiastic. The reason explains a lot about how the tech industry works.

Uber is now a massive, publicly traded company. Anyone can buy Uber shares at a valuation of about $70 billion. This isn’t bad for a company losing billions of dollars a year, but it’s a fraction of the $120-billion valuation the IPO’s bankers initially floated. It’s roughly what private investors valued it at three years ago, when the company made $7.43 billion less revenue.

If mothers and fathers speak openly about child-care obligations, their colleagues will adapt.

I’m an economist. I love data and evidence. I love them so much that I write books about data-based parenting. When questions arise about how to support parents at work (for example, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter), my first impulse is to endorse paid parental leave. Mountains of data and evidence show that paid leave is good for children’s health, and for mothers in particular. I am more than comfortable making a data-based case for this policy.

But experience, rather than pure data, leads me to believe that what happens after paid leave is nearly as crucial—that is to say, what happens when Mom and Dad return to the office. We need to normalize the experience of parenting while working.

Either Burger King was saying that it was going to send money to student borrowers using Cash App, a mobile payment service (a $cashtag is its version of a username), or the fast-food giant was trolling all 92,000 people who responded to the tweet. Some of the responses to the Whopper purveyor were in jest, others seemingly genuine, but everyone wanted to know: Is anyone actually getting any money?

On Thursday, Burger King provided an answer. An ad showed a white screen overlaid with a jarring statistic in slime green as “Pomp and Circumstance”— you know, the graduation song—plays; “65 percent of students enter the world with student debt,” it says. Then, in an abrupt transition, the Burger King “King” appears swinging a flamethrower like Michael B. Jordan in Fahrenheit 451. “Your student debt goes here,” a caption bubble reads.